A team of neuroscience and child development experts argue in in Science magazine that there is 鈥渘o empirical evidence鈥� that segregating students by sex improves education鈥攂ut that there is compelling evidence that it can increase gender stereotyping among students and adults.
The authors, led by Diane F. Halpern, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., found that the brain-based sex differences often cited by single-sex education advocates鈥攕uch as differences in memory tasks and brain-activation patterns鈥攈ave been small and generally the studies focused on adults, not children.
Likewise, they said, studies on the effectiveness of single-sex education programs have not accounted for academic differences in the students entering them. They found students in single-sex classes did not perform significantly better than those in mixed-gender classes, once their prior performance and characteristics were taken into account.
